Tag: Eugenics

Covid and the Re-emergence of Eugenics

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By Daniel Margrain

Nicky Clough visits her mother Pam Harrison in her bedroom at Alexander House Care Home for the first time since the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) lockdown restrictions begin to ease, in London, Britain March 8, 2021. REUTERS/Hannah Mckay

Years before moving towards explicit racial genocide, the Nazis developed the notion of ‘useless mouths’ or ‘life unworthy of life’ to justify the state’s killing of ‘low hanging fruit’ as part of its programme of ‘involuntary euthanasia’. Theorists argued that certain categories of people were nothing but a burden on society and therefore had no ‘right’ to life.

These ideas were a variant of nineteenth century ‘Social Darwinism’ and eugenicist theories, which adapted Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest to describe relationships within society or between nations and races as a perpetual evolutionary struggle in which the supposedly weaker or defective elements were weeded out by the strongest and the ‘fittest’ by natural selection.

Of course there was nothing ‘natural’ about these ideas, or the malignant ways that the Nazis made use of them. In Nazi ideology, the state killing of the disabled, the sick and the mentally-ill was the beginning of a conveyor belt that led to the wholesale extermination of the Jews and ‘inferior races’ during World War II.

Canada

In a shocking recent development, the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau, have explicitly resurrected the involuntary euthanasia idea within the body-politic. The country’s parliament.recently enshrined Medically Assisted Dying (MAID) into Canadian law.

In November last year, Canadian clothes retailer, ‘Simons’, even went as far as to market suicide to sell their products as part of a sweeping effort to introduce medically assisted suicide as a treatment for mental illness and PTSD. In April last year, The Spectator asked why Canada is euthanizing its poor?

“…when the Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID for short) for free. Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.”

The criteria Canada has used to legalize euthanasia is particularly problematic. It’s no longer required for people in Canada to be in debilitating pain to end their life, but be living in ‘unacceptable conditions’. This doesn’t take into account the fact that many people can’t afford to care for themselves to a standard that’s acceptable.

The UK

Disturbingly, the resurrection of eugenics as state policy is not restricted to Canada. In the UK these kinds of policies began to re-emerge during the Covid era. Increasingly the UK has become a society in which certain categories of people are regarded in principle, if not in practice, as ‘useless eaters’ whose value to society is measured in economic terms on the basis of how ‘productive’ they are and whether they are considered to be an unnecessary and unfair burden on the tax payer.

The main group of people the state have attributed economic value as a category to denote ‘quality of life year‘ needs, are the elderly. The state uses crude mathematical and economic cost-benefit calculations as a formula to determine the value to society of keeping the eldery and others in care alive.

It’s important to understand that the priority of the health care system in the UK is not to prolong life but to maximize profits.

In this sense, the National Health Service bureaucracy is fundamentally no different to a corporation. The purpose of the health care entity is to achieve the financial targets set for it by its political masters in government.

Increasingly, the paradigm of the UK health care system is shifting from a focus on ensuring patients are kept alive as long as possible, to how many patients can be saved on the basis of cost-effectiveness.

Care has become less about providing a service to those in need based on the notion of reciprocity, to one based upon the ability to pay for it. Those in care, in other words, are viewed less as ‘patient’s’ but more as ‘customers’ or ‘commodities’.

Psychopathic

The NHS bureaucracy, like the corporation, functions in a systematic way without empathy in much the same way a psychopath does.

So if the health care bureaucracy of the UK state does not provide an unconditional duty of care to citizens in need at the end of their life, what basis, if at all, is it obliged to do so?

Furthermore, who decides what patients doctors and nurses continue to persevere caring for and who makes the call about which patients to give up on?

Could a possible clue to the conundrum be established in the contents of an NHS clinical score-card called a Frailty Toolkit?

The Frailty Toolkit which states that ”people with severe frailty can be moving towards the end of life”, is one basis upon which a judgement to end a patients life is made. But who is being scored and for what reason, is not made clear in the NHS documentation.

The Frailty Toolkit, it would appear, has the ability to trigger a Anticipatory Care Planning (ACP) Pathway for elderly people who might of, for example, become frail as a result of an accident or fall.

ACP appear to be a mechanism for doctors to initiate do-not-resuscitate orders against patients or to push them into end of life care pathway’s.

These kinds of decisions are no longer made by spouse, parents or siblings. On the contrary, if it is deemed the patient is reaching the end of their life, it is solely a doctor who ultimately makes the final decision whether a patient lives or dies.

Ending a patient’s life is predicated, not on any concern the doctor has for the feelings, needs or demands of the patient or their loved ones, but from the perspective of the patient as a customer.

This is not to suggest that doctors who work within a bureaucratic system like the NHS are necessarily psychopathic, but rather, to recognise that the only reason they command such a position of responsibility and power is because of their willingness to enforce harmful government protocols against patients in their ‘care’.

But it’s not only employees of the health care bureaucracy who enforce the dictats of the state. Governments’ are also subject to imposing the policy agenda’s of their private-public policy-making partners at the top of the global chain.

During the Covid era, the health policy agenda’s of these private-public policy-making partners were distributed to the UK government and others by transnational institutions like the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation.

These health policy agenda’s are formulated into policy-specific protocols which, in the case of the UK health care system, determine the life and death decisions of patients. These protocols are based on economic ‘quality of life years‘ and other factors such as how many beds are needed and what the overall government policy is towards death at any given moment.

It is now indisputable that the private-public agenda at the top that guided socially and economically damaging Covid policy was based on a series of falsehoods and fear-mongering exaggerations.

For example, highly innaccurate catastrophic Covid death toll projections by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, London, were used as justifications by the UK government to introduce lockdown restrictions. These measures resulted in a decline in the educational attainment levels of the most disadvantaged children, the exacerbation of many pre-existing medical conditions and the closure of numerous small and medium-sized businesses.

All of this damage to the fabric of society was totally unnecessary because Covid was no more deadly than the flu. As the most reliable, robust meta analyses on Covid infection fertality rates conducted by Stanford medicine professor Dr. John Ioannidis confirms, the median infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.035 per cent for those aged 0-59. This cohort represent 86 per cent of the global population. In other words, the survival rate for 6.8 billion people across the world who were infected with Covid in 2021 was 99.965 per cent.

We also know that the ‘vaccines’ are doing more harm than good.to the point that Denmark have suspended them all for under forties and that the UK suspended Astra Zenica for under thirtees.

Hastening of deaths

From a UK government perspective, a key aim of the Covid agenda created by global private-public policy-makers, through protocol’s, is to ensure the hastening of deaths of ‘unworthy’ patients in hospitals and care homes.

Former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, oversaw this process on mass during the Covid era in the wake of the state’s implementation of mandates. These mandates meant that people were forbidden to visit their elderly loved ones in hospitals and care homes.

All mandates were a violation of fundamental civil liberties and.based on falsehoods sold to the public as ”the science”.

As Health Secretary, Matt Hancock was directly responsible for thousands of deaths in care homes. On the 19th March 2020, a directive was sent out to the NHS, with Hancock’s authorisation, instructing hospitals to discharge all patients into care homes who were deemed to not require a hospital bed.

In the same month, Hancock oversaw the procurement of two years’ worth of the death-row drug, Midazolam from France that were administered to patients in these homes.

It is clear that Hancock displayed gross negligence after formulating these policies.

Data taken from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows us that during April 2020 there were 26,541 deaths in care homes, an increase of 17,850 on the five-year average.

This litany of tragedies appear less like ‘mistakes’ and more like ‘deliberate killings’ by the state.

The Liverpool Care/Gosport End of Life Care Pathway’s

Another example of systematic killing by the state that preceded the Hancock scandal, but is very much tied in with it, were the deaths resulting from the Liverpool Care Pathway programme. The LCP was set up precisely to facilitate state employee enforcement of whatever policies or protocols psychopaths in government such as Hancock decide to adopt at any given time.

The LCP was banned after it was discovered that doctors and nurses responsible for enforcing the LCP protocol were killing their patients.using a combination of Madazolam and Morphine. The former acts as a respiratory repressant, induces amnesia and increases suggestibility, whilst the latter suppresses the pain of being unable to breath as patients slowly die.

Despite this scandal, however, the protocol effectively remains in place, having been adopted in every hospital throughout the UK and enforced as policy by employees of the state.

Doctors and nurses continue to administer a similar combination of drugs on vulnerable patients that restrict breathing.

Four years ago, a criminal inquiry was launched into into the deaths of hundreds of patients at Gosport War Memorial hospital in Hampshire between 1987 and 2001. The re-branded end of life care pathway protocol at Gosport which also involved state employees administering death-row drugs to vulnerable patients, resulted in 456 deaths.

Given what we know happened at the LCP, is the Gosport ELCP scandal part of a much wider pattern of systematic killing of end of life patients happening in hospitals throughout the country as yet unreported?

This seems likely. The implementation of national protocols that came into force during the early days of Covid, recommend that nurses and doctors administer at least five times the amount of Midazolam and Morphine than was previously recommended.

Every single patient in the UK, including disabled children, who are put on a ELCP DNR order, written by a doctor, are given this high dosage Midazolam and Morphine combination.

NHS documentation confirms that a DNR, or otherwise known as a DNACPR order, can be made by a doctor without the patient’s agreement. The sole purpose is to illegally hasten the patient’s death.

Other dangers

There is further disturbing evidence that blanket DNRs are being issued to patients by doctors including to those with learning difficulties. There is also anecdotal evidence which suggests that the issuing of blanket DNRs more broadly to other groups could be standard practice among doctors.

Recently, a viewer to UK Column, called Kelly, discovered that a DNR order had been slapped on her grandmother. Kelly said that neither her grandmother or any other family members had been informed of the decision to issue her with a DNR which happened after the latter was discharged from a short-stay hospital visit.

Kelly claimed that the doctor who signed the DNR hadn’t seen, or examined, her grandmother in over two years and that the DNR was predicated on a false diagnosis of her condition. There appeared to have been no communication or checks and balances in place or any indication that the doctor had abided by any of the obligations to the patient stated in the NHS DNR guidance information.

Although thankfully, the DNR decision was eventually rescinded, the issue does raise some serious questions, not least in relation to the lack of transparency between the bureaucracy of the state and the public who fund it. But most shocking of all, is the indifference of the medical profession to questions around euthanasia and eugenics in the post-covid world.

Since the Covid event there has been a noticeable increase in the corporate media’s endorsement of euthanasia and their lobbying for change to legalize the practice. The Canadian case study illustrates the potential dangers that result from legalization where all manner of social inequalities come into effect.

What happens, for example, in a situation in which poverty leads to mental illness in a context where the state uses economic calculations to determine whether people are no longer deemed to be worthy of life?

If, according to the state, the only value people bring to society is economic value, then those who don’t conform to that specific notion, can be determined by the aformentioned state to be unworthy of life.

There is a huge concern about the ability of the state to use this kind of crude quality of life calculation to legitimize the deliberate killing of huge amounts of people in a way that, as I have stated, is arguably already happening in hospitals and care homes throughout the country.

The Canada and UK examples act as a timely reminder that Nazi Germany was not the only country to categorize certain peoples according to strictly utilitarian notions of their perceived usefulness to society.

Hell of a state: What the tragic story of Don Lane tells us about Tory Britain

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By Daniel Margrain

Don Lane

Don Lane, who suffered from diabetes, earned his living by delivering parcels to peoples’s homes and businesses throughout the country. Although Mr Lane was paid a salary by the giant courier company he worked for, according to the law, he was “self-employed”.

The amount he was paid depended on how many parcels he delivered. Mr Lane received no holiday or sick pay and was under constant pressure to meet targets. Drivers for the company get fined by them for rounds they miss. Mr Lane was recently fined for attending a medical appointment to treat his diabetes where tragically he collapsed and died.

The scandal that underlies the story is one which the bosses and shareholders of giant multinational companies like the one Don Lane worked “self-employed” for, have seen their dividends and pay go through the roof, while workers at the bottom, have experienced a real terms drop in their income over many years. The ideology that drives this “gushing up” of wealth towards the top, is called neoliberalism.

Before its onset four decades ago, the UK was a much more equal society than it is at present. The available data shows that the share of income going to the top 10 per cent of the population fell over the 40 years to 1979, from 34.6 per cent in 1938 to 21 per cent, while the share going to the bottom 10 per cent rose slightly.

As measured by the Gini Coefficient (see below), the redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest, rose sharply under the Thatcher government in 1979. The trend continued, albeit less drastically, under successive Tory and Labour governments where it reached a peak in 2009-10.

Figures show that GDP, adjusted for inflation, has grown over the last 60 years from £432bn in 1955 to £1,864bn in 2016. This increase in wealth, however, has become increasingly concentrated in fewer hands.

Inequality

Source: IFS 2016

Impact of inequality

A report by Oxfam highlights the significant role neoliberalism plays in perpetuating inequality and suggests that the societies most affected are more prone to conflict or instability. The report also points out that extremes of inequality are bad for economic growth, as well as being related to a range of health and social problems including mental illness and violent crime.

Moreover, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of the book, The Spirit Level. argue that other impacts of inequality include drug addiction, obesity, loss of community life, imprisonment, unequal opportunities and poorer well-being for children.

Left Foot Forward has cited studies that illustrate the close correlation between inequality and unhappiness. The tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth means that inequality colours our social perceptions. It invokes feelings of superiority and inferiority, dominance and subordination – which affect the way we relate to, and treat, each other.

But rather than introducing socioeconomic policies that help reduce inequality, the Conservative government under Theresa May, has deliberately and consciously continued with the failed high borrowing-low investment/high debt economic neoliberal model that gives rise to it. Under the guise of austerity, the government have instead turned on workers, the sick and the disabled. The result has been increasing rates of depression, anxiety and suicides.

Fragmented

The existence of fragmented and atomised communities outside the confines of the workplace, the reduction in organised labour within it (illustrated by the long-term decline in trade union membership) and the lack of any safety net, means that ordinary people are increasingly vulnerable to the vagaries of “market forces”.

The ideology that underpins the neoliberal assault is the pseudo-science concept known as biological determinism, the legitimacy of which rests on the assertion that the social order is a consequence of unchanging human biology, as opposed to the result of inherited economic privilege or luck.

Thus, biological determinism reinforces the notion that inequality, injustice and the existence of entrenched hierarchical social structures of government, media and commerce are “natural”.

But it also highlights the artificial limits that a system driven by profit imposes. Any rejection of biological determinism and the rigged market system that reinforces it, is regarded by its promoters as being the fault of the individual, not the social institutions or the way society is structured.

Thus, according to evolutionary psychologists, sociobiologists and those within the elite political and media establishment, the solution to overcoming inequality and injustice is not to challenge existing social structures upon which “reality” is based, but rather to alter the chemical composition of the human brain to accommodate it to this reality.

In extreme circumstances it has been used to justify the elimination of individuals altogether who challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and/or whose values are perceived to be a “drain on the taxpayer”.

Social Darwinism

Years before moving towards explicit racial genocide, the Nazis developed the notion of ‘useless mouths’ or ‘life unworthy of life’ to justify its killing of ‘undesirables’ or ‘low hanging fruit’. These ideas are a variant of nineteenth century ‘Social Darwinism’ and eugenicist theories.

The said theories adapted Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest to describe relationships within society or between nations and races as a perpetual evolutionary struggle in which the supposedly weaker or defective elements were weeded out by the strongest and the ‘fittest’ by natural selection.

Intellectual challenges to neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology help undermine the notion that rigid social stratification, inequality and injustice used to justify them, are inevitable. Indeed, prominent economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs have for a long time been raising their voices against the neoliberal experiment.

What is self-evidently clear is that the current rigged economic system in which power is increasingly concentrated at the top, is not sustainable. The only thing preventing our ability to tackle extreme inequality is political will.

At the next election voters will be faced with a clear choice – either to maintain the status quo by returning the Conservatives to power or, alternatively, to engender a paradigm shift by electing a Labour government. If future Don Lane’s are to be avoided, then we have no alternative other than to ensure a Corbyn victory.

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What Kind of A Society Are We Prepared to Fight For?

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By Daniel Margrain

Pushing Earth of a cliff

In my February 21, 2017 article for Scisco Media I focused on the “conscious cruelty” inflicted by recent Labour and Tory governments’ on some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in our society. The piece proved to have been quite popular, reflecting a widespread hatred of a largely out-of-touch political class whose underlying set of principles are not much different to those that typified the rise of Nazism during the 1930s.

I pointed out that New Labour “feminist” ideologues like Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper were complicit in ensuring that Tory attacks against the sick and disabled would be implemented. The notion that both the Tories and Right factions within the Labour party consider Britain’s “low-lying fruit” as a drain on society to be eliminated, is not as far-fetched as some might believe.

This was certainly the view of Pat Hibernian McQueenie who commented:

“Good piece, it is time for JC and JMCD to remove the linen glove and put on the Iron Fist. If these two Politicians are removed from their posts the British Working Class will cease to exist. A new Class will be born or I should say reborn The British Slave Class will be implemented by the Right Wing.

Queuing at Work Premises I would use gates but there are not that many Left anyway all you who voted for the Tory be afraid be very very afraid. Death Camps will spring up in isolated places and I think you know the rest. All of You Should Have Watched “THE NAZIS A WARNING FROM HISTORY”

I hope whatever God if any You Worship Forgives You because I a disabled Human Being who worked all his Life from 9 until being struck down at the age of 59 WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU SELFISH SCUM SOCIETY You are the Worst Stupidest EVER.”

My piece also appeared to have struck a chord with Elizabeth Newport who wrote:

“Labour’s apathy since 2010 over the appalling benefit reforms upsets me more than the fact the tories have done it. I expect the tories to scapegoat and demean the vulnerable, that’s what they do, but I expected Labour to make their lives very difficult and for charities to be extremely vocal.

The truth is no one cares about the vulnerable, the electorate voted the tories in knowing what their plans were. Labour rolled over on the welfare reform bill. When we have all died from stress and poverty or killed ourselves they will find a new group to scapegoat. I can honestly say that as a mentally disabled person I have never felt so hopeless with regards to any political changes. I was a single parent in the early 1990’s when single parents were blamed and targeted. This is even worse.”

Elizabeth is partly right. The Tories did not mention who their intended target was for the cuts. Not one mainstream journalist leading up to the election pressed then DWP minister, Iain Duncan Smith, for clarification, and therefore, the Tories had no mandate with which to implement their stated programme of cuts.

Pathological

Although it could be reasonably argued that people rarely base their decision to vote for a party on a single issue, the notion that poor people vote in large numbers for the Tories who clearly have them in their sights, is only incomprehensible if one is of the opinion that such people are immune from directing similar forms of pathological hatred against those who are even poorer and weaker than they are.

Of course, the far-right tabloid media play a major part in fanning the flames of hate. But it’s insufficient to put the blame solely on them. Despite falling sales, Murdoch continues to shift millions of copies of the Sun on a daily basis and nobody is physically forcing working class people into the shops to buy it. It’s not just the Tories who pander to the whims of Murdoch either. New Labour under Blair and Brown, were only too eager to appease the racist demographic in the country.

Charity-industrial complex

A corrupt corporate media-political system dominated by power and money means that, literally, the government is getting away with murder. This injustice was articulated by Iam Klaatu in the comments section:

“I do not understand why this is allowed to continue? There are so many breaches of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially Articles 23 and 24, and even United Nations condemnation! And under Articles 2 & 4 of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, we have EVERY RIGHT, to see not just politicians and Lords, but EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBLE, from politicians, civil servants, job centre staff and managers, they can and WILL be made accountable for this crime against humanity!

The passive approach among what I refer to as the “charity-industrial complex” also play a complicit role. Klaatu continues:

“So why doesn’t Scope, MENCAP, MS, Cancer Research, etc etc etc , get off their backsides and unite, and stop this genocidal policy??? Or are they afraid of seeing their funding cut??? Their apathy is sickening!!! David Cameron, has even made patron of a charity, whose people are just one group of people that HIS government has hounded and starved to death!…It is an outrage!!!”

Eugenics

It’s my view that what we are witnessing in Britain today, is an early manifestation of a policy of eugenics which will become increasingly more obvious in the years ahead, particularly as robots begin to create a growing pool of idle ‘useless eaters’ among the existing white collar and blue collar workforce. Eventually, a critical-mass point will be reached in which the government of the day will be forced into making binary political choices.

Future governments will be faced with either funding a Universal Basic Income system or resist the necessity for change and, therefore, be prepared for mass civil disobedience on the streets of our towns and cities. As successive governments over the last 40 years have preferred the punitive ‘stick’ rather than the incentivising ‘carrot’ approach, the introduction of a UBI system is far from being a formality.

Of course, none of these potential policy proposals can be announced publicly by the government of the day, or by their media mouthpieces. Rather, the aim is to introduce them incrementally. It’s clear that the eugenics policy is one that is already well under way in Britain in 2017.

The latest in a series of appalling stories to have emerged, concerns Nicola Jeffery, a single parent from south east London. Nicola has fibromyalgia which causes chronic pain across the body. She is one of thousands of people with “invisible disabilities” whose benefits have been axed by the Tories as a result of new “reforms” to the personal independence payment (Pip) benefits system.

The “reforms” are part of a wider long-term strategy of welfare retrenchment, austerity and cuts to those most in need. The aim is the destruction of civilized society. All associated notions of civilization that people have come to take for granted – NHS, social care, fire service, education, public child care provision etc – are being whittled away and sold off for the benefit of private capital and shareholder’s, many of whom are working class people.

So we have to ask the question, what kind of a society do we want?

It’s no longer acceptable to solely blame the Tories for the problems we face. Many ordinary people who vote for right wing parties, including a corporate-corrupted Labour party dominated by a neoliberal core of war-monger’s, Friends of Israeli ethnic cleansing and austerity apologists, have to start looking in the mirror and begin educating themselves about what’s going on in their own communities; their own country; their own world.

Taking responsibility

Many of the problems stem from the fact that for far too long, too many people have not been prepared to take responsibility for their own actions, nor to evaluate how the individual decisions they make on a daily basis impact on society in general. The easy option in which people are prepared to look the other way for perceived short-term gain, can no longer be tolerated.

People who litter and fly-tip on our streets and fields, drive aggressively and at speed in built-up areas, in addition to engaging in other forms of anti-social behaviour, need to be politely confronted. We also need to minimize our individual carbon footprints the best we can, buy locally sourced and organic produce and reduce our consumption of meat.

The attitude for many seems to be that as long as they, as individuals, are not directly being affected by the travails going on around them, then they would sooner prefer to be oblivious to them, irrespective of their adverse impacts.

This lack of awareness and compassion for others, rooted in selfishness and crass individualism, is the bane of society and civilization. Although it might not be the case that the individual or close family member is seemingly unaffected, the nature of the direction of travel in society is such that in the absence of viable alternatives, it will nevertheless become the case further down the line.

Finite planet

Although it might not be the situation today, tomorrow or the day after that, the fragile nature of the planet humanity inhabits, means that the infinite grabbing of finite resources will eventually result in insurmountable negative repercussions in which even the super-rich will not be immune. After all, environmental degradation affects everybody and air pollution is democratic.

Never has Pastor Niemoller’s famous aphorism been more relevant. Climate change is altering the very fabric upon which the functioning of civilized society rests. What use can a depleted planet wrought by a system that prioritizes the accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake, serve for an elite that continuously craves it? The answer, of course, is that such a planet is of no use to any living thing.

The time to save humanity from itself is fast running out which is why we need to act. However, political shifts at the ballot box alone won’t be enough. We need collectively to go beyond naval-gazing towards positive action. We need to start getting informed about the real issues that humanity faces going forward and start to begin to look for radical solutions.

But we can only do this if an informed public is in a position to be able to correctly identify the cause of our collective malaise. Instead of devoting our energies on attacking the Other for the problems we face, we need to identify and target the source of our oppression. This means we have to think Big.

The local-global nexus, has arguably never been as relevant as it is now. This is because unlike previous epochs, we are the potential authors of our own destruction. In the past, as we moved from one socioeconomic and political form of organisation to another, we confronted, head on, the challenges we faced.

From hunter-gatherer societies through to feudalism, humans were master’s of their own destiny and they survived and prospered along the way. But during the latest capitalist phase, we have seemingly failed to acknowledge our limits as a species.

We cannot reason that lack of knowledge is the cause for our downfall. At the crossroad point along the metaphorical super highway, we made the informed choice to turn rapidly right in the certain knowledge that at the end of the road was a cliff whose precipice we were fast approaching but decided to continue along it’s fatal path regardless. For a species that claims to be at the top of the intellectual food chain, we sure are dumb.

Falling off a cliff

The truth is, we’ve not only sped to the cliff’s edge akin to being passengers of an out-of-control juggernaut, but we are plunging, free fall, towards a giant burning cauldron. We possess parachutes that are, in theory, capable of saving us from the affects of free-fall, but are fast reaching the point where the only eventuality will be hitting the ground with a thud.

Currently, we are at a critical stage between an insurmountable fate and a precarious survival. One of the things that can save us from our mass hypnosis and passivity in the face of a self-inflicted untimely death, is mass collective action. But collective activity in the strict political sense of the term is not enough either.

We also have to start radically changing our behaviour as consumers. This means a dramatic shift in expectations. It’s no longer reasonable for people to expect to spend £2 on a tee-shirt that has been produced by sweated labour in Pakistan, or to feign ignorance in order to justify other forms of immoral decision-making. Crucially, we need to stop buying ‘things’ we don’t need with money we haven’t got.

Because consumption is effectively the oil that lubricates the capitalist system, alternative forms of collective action on a massive scale will naturally correspondingly alter the way the current set of consumption-production relations function. This can only be beneficial for humanity and the planet.

Like the impact of a stone that lands in a pond whose ripples gradually spread further afield, the individual choices we as consumers make, in conjunction with our political choices, can eventually begin to set us free. But we need to hurry up because time is fast running out.

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